Bite Beauty is a new Sephora-exclusive product line that immediately turned my head, in part because of the elegant simplicity of the textured grey packaging with glossy red lettering, but also because of the alluring range of shades and textures – all just for lips. Also, the fact that Bite Beauty lip products contain food-grade ingredients and the resveratrol equivalent of five glasses of red wine is kinda cool too.

Well, I have to say these Bite Beauty High Pigment Matte Pencils are indeed highly-pigmented, and these aren’t your normal chunky lip pencils. If you’re looking for really good color payoff and you can find one of these Bite Beauty High Pigment Matte Pencils in your shade, then you might love these. The texture is smooth and creamy, and the matte finish is not completely dry, but is a slightly satiny matte, if that makes sense. (See swatches)

I really wanted to love this Bite Beauty pencil, and I almost did, but Honey Berry just wasn’t the right shade for me. It was just too unforgivingly matchy-nude on me, meaning it looked too similar to my skintone, though out of all the shades I thought Honey Berry might be the One. (I was hoping Honey Berry would be more along the lines of MACMidimauve in pencil form, but unfortunately it wasn’t quite pink-mauve enough, and the rest of the Matte Pencil shades looked way too intense for my taste.)

Hopefully these Honey Berry swatches will help someone else choose their Bite Beauty shade. If I were to pick another shade and go bold, I would probably give the rich red Pomegranate shade a try…

These Meilily swatches show Bite Beauty High Pigment Matte Pencil in Honey Berry at different angles, and you can see that the same product looks both semi-matte and also satiny.

I wish I had this High Pigment Matte Pencil in the right shade for me! It would be nearly perfect! Plus, Bite Beauty products like this one smell pretty good. (The scent reminds me a little of bubblegum, but slightly more sophisticated.)